Buddy Guy “A Man and The Blues” (1968)

     Back to the blues today with some of the best pure blues guitar I have heard yet.  Today’s album is “A Man and the Blues”, by Buddy Guy.  He has a rich, high tenor voice that compliments his guitar playing very nicely, but it is definitely the instrumental side of this album that stands out for me.  It is rated as the #5 Best Blues Album of All Time by digitaldreamdoors.com.

     The title track opens the album with his sublime guitar and Otis Spann just crushing it on the piano.  Somehow, this really delivers one of the most authentic and pain-laden blues songs I have heard.  The rest of the album goes from fast to slow, and from slow to fast, all dominated by the nimble solos of Buddy’s guitar.  A pleasant surprise was “Money (That’s What I Want), written by Berry Gordy as one of the very first hits for Motown, several years before John Lennon and the Beatles released their version.  Later in the album, another surprise discovery was Buddy’s take on “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.  Having come of age in the 1980s, I always assumed it was Stevie Ray Vaughan who created this musical take on the simplest of nursery rhymes, but it was great to hear the original blues version by Buddy.

     By this point in time, British and American rock bands had fairly well overtaken traditional blues artists in popularity.  As such, it is refreshing to hear this music in its purest form still thriving in parallel, untouchable in its truthful lineage.